Experimental Filmmaker Lynne Sachs
The Independent Film and Video Monthly
March, 1994
By Susan Gerhard
Lynne Sachs calls her latest film, Which Way is East?. A “work-in-process.”She uses the phrase to describe those of her experimental documentaries that evolve over time.This particular one started as a road trip and flowered into a political discourse:It’s a half-hour travel diary of her trip to Vietnam – a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt.
That warmth is no accident.For Sachs, film is folk art.Pieces are crafted much as they’re conceptualized.Her work is hands-on everything, from the film itself to the machines she reshapes it on.“I was welding electronics on this machine one hour ago,” Sachs notes casually as we settle in to watch Which Way Is East? on a portable six-plate flatbed.She later describes the optical printer – the machine she uses to double-expose and linger over particular frames – like it’s a family heirloom.“An optical printer is sort of from that era of the sewing machine.You hear every single stitch.”
Sachs sees film as a mutable thing, as her phrase “film-in-process” indicates.She’s turned two of her films into installations: The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), in which she torches a doll house and the anti-feminist myths contained inside it, metamorphosed into a three-dimensional exhibit at Artists’ Television Access in 1991.And work-in-process States of UnBelonging turned up as an installation in 1992 at Buffalo’s Hallwalls Center for the Arts.
Like most of Sachs’ films, Which Way Is East? is personal.In 1992 Sachs slipped her Bolex camera into her backpack and went to visit her sister in Vietnam.There she shot 40 minutes of film, much of it a few frames at a time out the window of a room where, due to illness, she was confined to her bed.When she returned to the United States, she put together a 30-minute film that combines Vietnamese parables, history, and memories of the Vietnamese people she met, as well as her own childhood memories of the TV war.
In the film, Sachs recalls visiting Vietnam’s Museum of War Atrocities.While standing in the American Wing, she looks across the street and notices that another part of the museum is closed.Her sister explains that Vietnam’s relations with China are good, so there are no visiting hours for viewing China’s war atrocities.
To Americans for whom “Vietnam” ended in 1975, Which Way Is East? is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war.The film has a combination of qualities that make Sachs well admired among Bay Area experimental filmmakers: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.
A 1979 graduate of Brown University, Sachs traded her history degree for a Bolex camera.She moved to San Francisco in 1985, got a Masters in Cinema from San Francisco State, and earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.Since then, she’s worked her way from office temp and sound technician to filmmaker and lecturer, and has exhibited in festivals ranging from Atlanta to Oberhausen.
Which Way Is East? continues a practice she began with he 1989 project, Sermons and Sacred Pictures.This half-hour film depicts the life of Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Memphis preacher and filmmaker who, in the 1920s, gave witness to the idea that film, as a medium of self-representation, could affect people.He made and exhibited films of his congregations’ baptisms and daily lives.
“[Taylor] preserved something; [he used] that relationship of being an artist to bring something back to the place,” says Sachs, who has a similar modus operandi.She showed Taylor’s films to a congregation in San Francisco when she was collecting sounds from the church for Sermons and Sacred Pictures.The churchgoers recognized scenes from Taylor’s films: aunts, uncles, places.It brought their South back to them.
Making Which Way s East?, she made another connection – this time across continents.Sachs asked a number of Vietnamese Americans to help her decipher parables and read the stories she gathered from conversations in Vietnam for the film’s narration.In the process, many recognized their own stories.Sometimes, Sachs gets a personal invitation to dinner when the day’s work is done.
Sachs’ populism is not a hobby.In her daily double-life, she’s a teacher.She’s constantly impressed by the visions and skills of first-time film and videomakers in her courses at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.She’s also pleased to be able to watch her favorite films (works by former San Franciscan Bruce Conner, for one) again and again – and get paid for it.But it’s in the six months between teaching gigs when the real work gets done; when she descends into her studio and concentrates, uninterrupted, on her film craft.
“I like the term ‘filmmaker,’” she told the San Francisco Bay Guardian, “because it’s like the word homemaker,” Sachs has reinvented that word in the same way she reinvents film.
Susan Gerhard
Susan Gerhard is a film critic for the SF Bay Guardian.
“I am not a movie buff,” Lynne Sachs explains over tapas and Anchor Steam at Zanzibar near her home in the Mission. In an age of Quentin Tarantinos and “independent” filmmakers whose life experiences extend only as far as the local video store, it’s refreshing to hear that kind of self-description. Sachs isn’t interested in repackaging what’s already been consumed.
The nature of Sachs’ work. From Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) to The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), is something like “nurture.” Her films gestate, accumulate a language and a life of their own. By the time they emerge into the world for the big smack, they have a reason to be.
“I like the term filmmaker because it’s like the word homemaker.” Sachs, it turns out, became the former. A graduate of Brown University in 1979, in the era of Christine Vachon, Todd Haynes, and semiotics, Sachs would trade in her history degree for a Bolex camera. She moved to San Francisco in 1985 and took graduate courses at S.F. State and the S.F. Art Institute, where she accumulated influences and mentors like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Gunvor Nelson.
Like those filmmakers, Sachs is both craftswoman and experimental artist. She likes the gadgetry– “an optical printer is sort of from the era of the sewing machine; you hear every single stitch” – but her films don’t so much occupy the common theoretical spaces as create new ones.
In the HOuse of Science, a film that began as an installation at Artists’ Television Access, Sachs torches a doll house and the social manipulations it contained– the pathologizing of female sexuality, medical control over the female body. An earlier film, Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989) overturned the idea of “the gaze” in a similarly brave manner. In it, she explained– and gave broader context to – the world of Memphis’ Rev. Taylor, a man who preached through film, making movies for his congregations. She used “found politics” as well as “found footage” and rewrote a piece of film history.
“He [Taylor] preserved something, [he used] tjay relationship of being an artist to bring something back to the place.” Sachs, who grew up in Memphis and now teaches courses at California College of Arts and Crafts.
Berkeley Undergraduate Film Association Newsletter
Nov/Dec 1992
Interview with L. Sachs, filmmaker and visiting instructor at U.C. Berkeley by Karen Rester
LS: …when I was about 18, I had a Summer job at a place called the Center For Southern Folklore stuffing envelopes for a fund- raising campaign. There were these quilts all over the place and potters walking in and out and musicians fromYazoo City, Mississippi or wherever. Actually, they had just made a film called Four Women Artists; it was about a quilt maker, a painter, a needlepoint artist,and someone else. I thought, “This is incredible this …way of discovering the South.” I didn’t really like living in the South because I didn’t really like Memphis at the time and I thought, “Ob, there are greater horizons somewhere else.” But I liked this sort of side of the South that was not so easily accessible and that was so much about secrets and pasts and the ways that people made things out of nothing, and so I hung out there for longer. They had just acquired the whole film, photography, and sound recording collection of Reverend L.O. Taylor that year; he had died in 1977. The Center started interviewing people whose pictures were in the photographs and I had a job transcribing the sound recordings that he’d made on 78 rpm discs. He was a preacher who also made films in the 1930’s and 40’s. I was astounded at this way that be interacted with the community. We took the films around to churches that summer and then I went away to college. I remembered what I had done that summer but I didn’t really think that this had a big impact on me. I had always been involved in the arts and I kept doing paintings and poetry and things like that but I also got really involved with history; I was a history major in college. At least years later I discovered that film was a way to draw on my art interests and my interests in things like these people that I’d met or heard of back then. Film was also a way to take me somewhere as ~ different person, to allow me to integrate these experiences into things that I was doing in a different way than painting or poetry was. I still love that way of working and it is still part of the way I work but film also gives me the chance to ask lots of questions, or to go back to Memphis ten years later with a different kind of desire, to discover… I think I’m much more curious about the world than I was then (laughs) and about not just the world but what was right next to me. So that was kind of how I first got interested in film.
House of Science, Personal Films and Other Dangerous Substances
KR: YOu don’t consider yourself exclusively a filmmaker in the sense that you often incorporate your own collages, sculptures, and poetry into your films.
LS: Yes, the last film I did, House of Science, and the one I’m working on now were kind of installations, sculpture pieces at first. The new film is tentatively called States of Unbelonging. I did a sculpture piece that allowed me to work with all these different materials…but actually a lot of it was film. I took film frames and put them into handmade slides, if you can imagine this, with dirt and feathers, all different things, and then blew them up; they’re really beautiful. [The film] is about letting the material speak to me because I’m not that good at sitting down and writing out a script. I like to be open to thoughts. I did say to myself this time, “I’m going to do all the production and then all the post-production,” but I just can’t work that way. I’m awed by people who can. With House of Science, I wrote the end when I was finishing the film. The end was the end.
KS: House of Science has often been interpreted as addressing the notion of women as constructs, that is constructed by institutions, by Science, by Art. Was this your original premise for the film?
LS: It just happened that I made those collages [which seem to illustrate this concept]… Actually I was maybe embarrassed and maybe just confused about things that I did and didn’t know about my body. I wouldn’t say that I was bitter towards Science, or maybe I was a little bit, but Science is a big word and it has more to do with being awkward because you don’t have the tools. And I didn’t have the sort of language to know even bow to talk about certain kinds of physical experiences. I felt so especially as a young person. I made the film, I think, when I got to the point where I did feel more comfortable. I could look at that uncomfortableness of the younger period and say, “I’ve changed a little bit. Now I feel that I can make something that’s about that.”
KR: It was really a personal experience for you…
LS: Yes.
KR:…and I guess this leads into the question of “personal films” and why especially women filmmakers feel compelled to make them. With House of Science did you envision making a “personal film” – this being a label that has been applied to filmmakers like Chick Strand and Linda Tadic. The term “personal film” seems to refer to an opening up on the filmmaker’s part; perhaps the desire as bell hooks has put it, to move “from margin to center” as a woman. TO open yourself up so fully to the spectator that they can’t ignore you. You’re exposing yourself, you’re communicating to other women, and at the same time you’re creating filmic art.
LS:
I think it was wanting to…feeling that there was such a thing as a community of women and such a thing as working with a language that was so personal that it communicated first to women on one level and then to men on another level. I never wanted it to be exclusive at all. But I do think that men and women read differently…their schematic is different because we walk through the forest and we look at the stars and somehow see them a little bit differently, and so I wanted to delve into that I wasn’t looking at the language I developed for this film and saying “this is specifically female.” I have this section of the text which talks about touching your breasts and I wanted it to allude to the touching of your breasts when you’re looking for bumps, cancerous bumps as we’re supposed to do, and I think it’s really great if women do it and think “I’m taking responsibility for myself. I had a friend who was dying of cancer at the time that I wrote that. But as I was writing it, the writing made me see that I was also talking about being able to touch your body. Interestingly enough several men saw this section in a very different way. You know there’s this thing about masturbation and men: “of course every man does “. But it’s not very celebrated for women at all, whether you’re talking about pop culture or even from the most intimate of diaries — looking out or coming from within. (pause) Modern mythology has created this rite of passage for men and not for women. I wanted to say that touching your body if you’re talking about masturbation is like part of this change, a coming into being autonomous. So with that one section I’m always curious how people read it and women often see it as talking about checking your breasts for bumps while men seem to interpret this more sexually. I’m thrilled by this ambiguity.
KR: And also the title itself, House of Science, as well as the opening scene in which the woman talks about her first trip to the gynecologist, seem to refer to the body of woman as being experimented upon.
LS: And that you need a guide.
KR: And that you need to be told how to look at your body.
LS: Yes. And so I didn’t want there to be the need for a guide whether you’re talking about masturbation or about the preservation of your existence. But it’s interesting to see how people who’ve lived in the world in different ways look at my film. There are a couple of places that people have read as being about AIDS. I never even knew that that was in the film, but the way that I wrote about liquids and bow you struggle to keep them in… People have told me that it would be just as accurate for someone with a disease.
Trinh, Irigaray, and Sacred Pictures
KR: You’ve said that Luce Irigaray and Trinh Minh-Ha have been influential in your work and writings. How so?
LS: When I first met Minh-Ha I was working on my documentary film, Sermons and Sacred Pictures. There’s a certain kind of distance she has in her work as in she doesn’t try to dominate a situation but she tries to let it unravel. This is also reflected in] the way that she uses different voices so that many voices come together to create a sense of a whole; there’s not a hierarchy. I was really intrigued by that. And then she wrote an article called “Ear Over Eye” which I always loved. It’s really specifically about film; about letting there be silences. In Sermons and Sacred Pictures, I wouldn’t necessarily say I had silences but I had these places – black sections that were like visual silences. I wanted them to fragment the film and it frustrates some people. I wanted to say, “This is not a completely whole picture of a person,” because I didn’t even know the person. I can only say what I gleaned from listening to people, and from working with bis [Reverend Taylor’s] materials; from taking myself back there and from being from there originally. I didn’t want to make a film that recreated something I would be projecting on. …There’s another thing that I remember hearing Minh-Ha say which had to do with the ways of shooting; that the zoom lens gives you so much power and doesn’t bring your body into [it]…
KR: You remain the outsider, observing from a distance.
LS: Yes, and I wanted to interact with the people that I was talking to in a very physical way…to be more present and more visible and not outside the radius of someone’s gaze. …There is a kind of intimacy that is instinctual. In a documentary you have to be more participatory as well as more knowledgeable about the potential of your equipment.
KR: But in Sacred Pictures we never see the people you are interviewing. Their voices are never presented as “actual sound” and this seems to create a distance.
LS: Well I did that whole film, I shot it and recorded it, petty much by myself. I was talking to people that were just meeting me and they were at first kind of uncomfortable but then they really opened up. I felt like not having a camera there made them feel more at ease. I just recorded it on tape; there is no synch-sound in that at all. This is a big issue that I still have a question about. I couldn’t sit here and say, “This is my ethic. The reason I didn’t have their faces and their voices at the same time was this and this.” Part of it was economic, a big part; part of it was that I wanted to be as close to them as possible and not to be distracted by cameras and lights and things like that. I just walked all over-the neighborhood that Reverend Taylor had lived in with my camera. I saw neighborhoods I didn’t even know existed, just beautiful neighborhoods and parks …it was like a new city… and I wanted to do it by myself. To use a crew would have been really different. So, that was the film that I was able to make on my own. When I finished it some people, mostly other-white filmmakers, said, “Don’t you feel strange that you went into this community” as if they would be very assaulted that way. I think, and I heard this from a Black professor at Howard, that it would have been condescending if I had decided nott to make it because I was white; he was really glad that I had. Not to say, “Oh, you understand,” but not to let those barriers stop you right away. I know so much more about the black filmmaking community from making this film.
***
KR: Talk about Irigaray
LS: Well I was part of a women’s reading group about five years ago with Peggy Ahwessh and Jennifer Montgomery; a lot of filmmakers who were here now don’t live here anymore. But we were all reading Lacan for the first time and [continuing to] read feminist theorists [such as lrigaray and Helene Cixous]. None of us had studied that in college so it was completely coming from what we wanted to bite into, which to me is exciting; it wasn’t passed down from some authority figure. So we would meet at somebody’s house and each of us brought a book… It was very very serious and we all felt terribly guilty if we didn’t read what we were supposed to read. I think it affected all of our work quite a lot. You asked about responsibility- I felt like I had to [incorporate what we had been reading into House of Science], partly because I was in this milieu, mentally connected to a group and grappling with issues about the identity and the experience of being a woman. But also I was so stimulated by lrigaray. It colored the way I was writing, just how she looks at the body in this really visual way. She’s not talking about art at all but..she sort of theorizes physical things; the body becomes all these different faces of mirrors so that your mind is like a mirror onto your body and you learn about a certain kind of philosophy that comes from – people say lack but she doesn’t use that word – that comes from a body that contains holes, or a body that welcomes them…And even if it was essentialist it didn’t bother me, it intrigued me. It was sort of lauding something that I’d always felt but that I hadn’t been able to embrace somehow intellectually. I didn’t even realize how much she had influenced me until I had a show in Los Angeles soon after I had finished House of Science . A woman raised her hand and asked, “So, when did you start reading Irigaray?”
On Lifting Belly
I love Gertrude Stein now. I was reading Gertrude Stein when I was making that film (House of Science). I knew that she was going to figure into it. I liked the way she played with words… sort of non-linear but still driven by some kind of illusions, but not metaphoric because I’m always fascinated by metaphor and I like that she wasn’t, that she worked with other kinds of linguistic plays, tropes. I was reading her poetry one day in bed and I started reading it out loud and it was completely different…it was like “Ahh” that’s what it is, it’s supposed to be out loud. And so I had the poem and I loved that it was about lifting belly, like about weight or about flesh or about…just that word lifting belly sounds really fantastic; it’s very female. So I thought that I’d ask my friend who has a 16 year old daughter to read it. Well the daughter could not stand it because it was too haphazard for her. You see, she was coming to an understanding of a rational way of speaking, but Stein was pulling her back to some way of speaking that is extremely creative but deceptively childlike. The daughter wanted desperately to get into adult life and adult language and it made her really uncomfortable to read that whereas her mother loved it, and so we just decided to read sort of as a round together; I decided to leave in the part where we mess up. So, that’s how that happened.
Film as Weapon
KR: What does this tendency in women avant-garde/experimental filmmakers to make personal films mean to you?
LS: I would never say that most women want to make personal films. I think there are many women who would love to make impersonal films but who only want to see their name slapped alongside the title “director” or “producer”. I see myself as a filmmaker, and maybe that term harkens back to a much older term, one that we now tend to shiver at the thought of: homemaker. But what I like about it is the non-hierarchical position it takes. This kind of personal work comes from a place that is very critical, often angry but presumably grounded in an artist’s experience and vision. In its honesty it is a kind of filmic expression that can be subversive and I think expressive.
KR: Do you see you work as a weapon?
LS: If in any way I were to think of myself as a weapon it would be as a weapon against stagnated thinking. I want to trigger my audience into thinking differently and independently.
Wide Angle Volume 14, published in 1992. The House of Science: Museum of False Facts / Feminist Polemics through Film Poetry by Marilyn Fabe.
In The House of Science:A Museum of False Facts, Lynne Sachs exposes the edifice of scientific “facts” with which the male-dominated disciplines of science and medicine have constructed an image of what a woman is. Through-out the 30-minute film, Sachs traces the unfortunate interface between women and science, a terrain in which men are supposed to have all the knowledge, defining and mapping out women as their territory, while women are alienated from their own bodies.
This synopsis of the film’s thesis doesn’t begin to convey the wit, complexity and visual brilliance with which Sachs approaches her subject. Indeed, I would argue that she achieves in this film what Sergei Eisenstein sought through intellectual montage: “to restore to the intellectual process its fire and passion … to give back to emasculated theoretical formulas the rich exuberance of life-felt forms.” Through associative montage, superimposed collage, and sound in counterpoint to image, she launches an attack on the presumed objectivity of western science, and exposes the limitations of verbal language in expressing “the truth.” Sachs does this by replacing the language of logic and science with a complex film poetry. The House of Science is a passionate feminist film that makes its point through poetry rather than polemics.
Even as Sachs depicts the house of science into which women have been locked, she subtly and subversively dismantles it-or, in a metaphor more appropriate to the film’s denouement, burns it down. The manner in which the first sequence works suggests the structure of the film as a whole. Before the titles appear, Sachs counterpoints found footage of a man in a white jacket-a Doctor with a capital 0-escorting a woman into a glass booth. This image is accompanied by a voiceover of a woman describ- ing the cold, perfunctory manner in which she was treated during her pregnancy by her gynecologist. Here the disparate sound and image tracks uncannily mesh, the glass booth becoming a symbol of the sterile House of Sci- ence in which women have been enclosed, objectified and observed. At the same time, the voice of the woman reflecting on her pregnancy reminds us that everyone’s original dwelling is the woman’s body. In a flash of recognition an idea bursts forth: because men come from a mysterious house (the womb), they have a compulsive
need to put women back into one (the doctor leading the woman into the glass booth). The sadistic implications of this are played out associatively when the same doctor detonates a fuse which causes a model of a house to burst into flames. Sachs adds her own heat (her anger) to this image by tinting the black and white image of the burning house with flashes of orange.
This foregrounding of the filmmaker’s feelings, superim- posed in color on the black and white image, resonates suggestively with the pregnant woman’s description of her gynecologist: “He always struck me as short, cold and with glasses and he may not look like that at all.” At issue here is the questioning of any kind of objective reality. Unlike the authoritarian certainty with which men speak throughout the film, this woman acknowledges how feelings filter our perceptions of reality.
Sachs exposes the hidden feeling behind the language of science by quoting one Lombroso, a 19th century “expert” on criminality in women, who pontificates on the “irrefutable physical signs of a born thief” in a nine-year- old girl. The ignorance, prejudice and insanity of Lombrasso’s words, which appear irr subtitles, are rendered even more ridiculous because they are read on the soundtrack by a female child who mangles the text by stumbling over the pronunciation of the words. On the image track is an exuberant nine-year-old girl in a Batman costume, a superhero in her resistance to the misogynist science of men. The image of the little girl changes to one of a dancing woman, who, unlike the child, is not free but contained in a crudely chalk-drawn frame of a house, reminding us of how adult women lose the liberty of girlhood only to be confined in the constrictive House of Science.
Sachs places frames around men as well, play- fully asserting the power of the woman artist to turn the tables. In one instance a man stands before a picture frame lecturing on anatomy. As he discusses the framework of the body, he himself appears in a frame, and the prurience underlying his pompous abstractions is exposed when the picture in the frame within a frame turns into a nude woman.
As the film progresses, Sachs increasingly presents images of women defining themselves. Three adult women, who earlier had dutifully mouthed Lombrasso’s certainty that female thieves and “above all prostitutes” have a cranial capacity inferior to that of “moral women,” begin to speak for themselves. For example, a woman art critic offers insight into why the pubic hair was removed from Renaissance representations of Venuses: ”fhe more the visual image can be disarmed the better the male artist feels.” And the filmmaker’s journal entry expresses the exhilaration and power of a woman with a speculum looking into herself.
Yet Sachs offers no smug sense of victory for women. The latter images in the film, like those at the beginning, are riddled with ambiguity. The woman with the speculum lives in dread of the cancer she might find now that she has the power to examine herself. And little girls, who through- out the film resist the confinements of their culture, are given the gaze-they become spectators in movie houses-only to witness hauntingly beautiful images of graceful south sea island women spoiled by a sexist and racist voice-of-god commentary.
Although Sachs does not posit any material or transcen- dent victory for women, her film does offer a model of witty, exuberant, sensual and subversive film language that questions and subverts the patriarchal structures of thought and representation that for centuries have impris- oned women. Thus, at the end of the film the blazing house reappears, but now it takes on a new meaning: the fire that bursts forth and collapses the walls of the house becomes a powerful metaphor for the incendiary power of the woman poet/polemicist to destroy from within the oppressive structure of the House of Science.
Marilyn Fabe teaches Film Studies and Women’s Studies At the UniversityofCalifornia-Berkeley. She is The Co-author Against theClock:Career Women Speak on the Choice to Have Children (RandomHouse, 1979).
In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, Lynne Sachs exposes the edifice of scientific “facts” with which the male-dominated disciplines of science and medicine have constructed an image of what a woman is. Through-out the 30-minute film, Sachs traces the unfortunate inter-face between women and science, a terrain in which men are supposed to have all the knowledge, defining and mapping out women as their territory, while women are alienated from their own bodies.
This synopsis of the film’s thesis doesn’t begin to convey the wit, complexity and visual brilliance with which Sachs approaches her subject. Indeed, I would argue that she achieves in this film what Sergei Eisenstein sought through intellectual montage: “to restore to the intellectual process its fire and passion … to give back to emasculated theoretical formulas the rich exuberance of life-felt forms.” Through associative montage, superimposed collage, and sound in counterpoint to image, she launches an attack on the presumed objectivity of western science, and exposes the limitations of verbal language in expressing “the truth.” Sachs does this by replacing the language of logic and science with a complex film poetry. The House of Science is a passionate feminist film that makes its point through poetry rather than polemics.
Even as Sachs depicts the house of science into which women have been locked, she subtley and subversively dismantles it—or, in a metaphor more appropriate to the film’s denouement, burns it down. The manner in which the first sequence works suggests the structure of the film as a whole. Before the titles appear, Sachs counterpointsfound footage of a man in a white jacket—a Doctor with a capital D—escorting a woman into a glass booth. This image is accompanied by a voiceover of a woman describing the cold, perfunctory manner in which she was treated during her pregnancy by her gynecologist. Here the disparate sound and image tracks uncannily mesh, the glass booth becoming a symbol of the sterile House of Science in which women have been enclosed, objectified and observed. At the same time, the voice of the woman reflecting on her pregnancy reminds us that everyone’s original dwelling is the woman’s body. In a flash of recognition an idea bursts forth: because men come from a mysterious house (the womb), they have a compulsive need to put women back into one (the doctor leading the woman into the glass booth). The sadistic implications of this are played out associatively when the same doctor detonates a fuse which causes a model of a house to burst into flames. Sachs adds her own heat (her anger) to this image by tinting the black and white image of the burning house with flashes of orange.
This foregrounding of the filmmaker’s feelings, superimposed in color on the black and white image, resonates suggestively with the pregnant woman’s description of her gynecologist: “He always struck me as short, cold and with glasses and he may not look like that at all.” At issue here is the questioning of any kind of objective reality. Unlike the authoritatian certainty with which men speak throughout the film, this woman acknowledges how feelings filter our perceptions of reality.
Sachs exposes the bidden fooling behind the language of science by quoting one Lombrosso, a 19th century “expert” on criminality in women, who pontificates on the “irrefutable physical signs of a born thief” in a nine-year-old girl. The ignorance, prejudice and insanity of Lombrasso’s words, which appear in subtitles, are rendered even more ridiculous because they are read on the sound track by a female child who mangles the text by stumbling over the pronunciation of the words. On the image track is an exuberant nine-year-old girl in a Batman costume, a super hero in her resistance to the misogynist science of men. The image of the little girl changes to one of a dancing woman, who, unlike the child, is not free but contained in a crudely chalk-drawn frame of a house, reminding us of how adult women lose the liberty of girlhood only to be confined in the constrictive House of Science.
Sachs places frames around men as well, playfully asserting the power of the woman artist to turn the tables. In one instance a man stands before a picture frame lecturing on anatomy. As he discusses the framework of the body, he himself appears in a frame, and the prurience underlying his pompous abstractions is exposed when the picture in the frame within a frame turns into a nude woman.
As the film progresses, Sachs increasingly presents images of women defining themselves. Three adult women, who earlier had dutifully mouthed Lombrasso’s certainty that female thieves and “above all prostitutes” have a cranial capacity inferior to that of “moral women,” begin to speak for themselves. For example, a woman art critic offers insight into why the pubic hair was removed from Renaissance representations of Venuses: “The more the visual image can be disarmed the better the male artist feels.” And the filmmaker’s journal entry expresses the exhilaration and power of a woman with a speculum looking into herself.
Yet Sachs offers no smug sense of victory for women. The latter images in the film, like those at the beginning, are riddled with ambiguity. The woman with the speculum lives in dread of the cancer she might find now that she has the power to examine herself. And little girls, who throughout the film resist the confinements of their culture, arc given the gaze—they become spectators in movie houses—only to witness hauntingly beautiful images of graceful south sea island women spoiled by A sexist and racist voice-of-god commentary.
Although Sachs does not posit any material or transcendent victory for women, her film docs offer a model of witty, exuberant, sensual and subversive film language that questions and subverts the patriarchal structures of thought and representation that for centuries have imprisoned women. Thus, at the end of the film the blazing house reappears, but now it takes on a new meaning: the fire that bursts forth and collapses the walls of the house becomes a powerful metaphor for the incendiary power of the woman poet/polemicist to destroy from within the oppressive structure of the House of Science.
Marilyn Fabe teaches Film Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. She is the co-author of Up Against the Clock: Career Women Speak on the Choice to Have Children (Random House, 1979).
THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS is distributed by
Images from Film & Doba 1991, text by Stanislav Ulver.
“In Film a Doba, Stanislav Ulver started publishing texts about animated films in the early eighties. In 1989, he became a member of the editorial staff and four years later the editor-in-chief. During his tenure, Film a Doba was one of the few periodicals that consistently reflected non-fiction, animated and experimental cinematography. In addition to professional articles, Ulver has published countless reviews, festival reports, interviews and translations here. His texts were also published in Illumination , Analogon , ASIFA News and a number of domestic and foreign catalogs.
He worked as a teacher at FAMU, where he taught the history of animated and avant-garde film and led seminars on film aesthetics and media criticism. He was the editor of the anthologies Film and Time: 1962–1970 (1997), Light in Us. Experimental Film (2003) and Animation and the Time 1955–2000 (2004). Editorially prepared the release of the screenplay by Marketa Lazarová (1998). In 1991, his monograph Western Film Avant-Garde was published.
On May 14 2022, film theoretician, columnist, educator and former editor-in-chief of Film and Time Stanislav Ulver passed away. Honor his memory!” –Film a Doba
“The House of Science: a museum of false facts” 30 min., color, sound, 1991
“Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.” (SF Cinematheque)
“A disturbing discovery and a remarkable exposition. The film demonstrates Sachs’ natural gifts as an autobiographer, a philosopher and a true artist.” (Melbourne Film Festival)
“The film takes off on a visual and aural collage…combining the theoretical issues of feminism with the discrete and personal remembrances of childhood.” ( San Francisco Bay Guardian)
“Throughout ‘The House of Science’ an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.'” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archives)
Charlotte Film Festival, First Prize Experimental; Atlanta Film Festival, Honorable Mention Experimental; International Audiovisual Experimental Festival, Arnheim, Netherlands; Black Maria Film Fest, Juror’s Award; Hallwalls Center for the Arts, Buffalo, NY; Humbolt Film Festival, Teffen Filter Award; Museum of Modern Art, Cineprobe; Portland Museum of Art, “Icons, Rebels and Visionaries”; Athens Film Festival, Experimental Prize; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Utah Film Festival, First Prize Short Film.
In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Lynne Sachs curates a moving-image exhibition of womanhood, carefully sampling artifacts from the past (fabricated truths built to sustain male dominancy), intertwined with empirical artifacts of her own history (personal truths and memories). Through the power of visual and aural association, several domains of the exhibit simultaneously unfold in front of us: the personal, the public and the historical. Sachs drifts between these domains smoothly until a whole network of information is gently bestowed upon us. We start with the image of a doctor guiding a woman into a glass booth, followed by him setting a model house on fire, and the sound of Sachs’ voice, telling us about her experience of being examined by an apathetic gynecologist while pregnant. The image of the detached male doctor lingers with us for the whole length of the movie, along with his perverse power over a female body, over her right to “bare armor”—as in, contraception—and over her right to give birth. Together with Sachs, we wince at the story of her obtaining a contraceptive diaphragm. The doctor has no issue sending her off into battle with her new armor and zero instructions on how to do it. “I leave his office fully equipped, protected, and completely incapable of placing that plastic sheath over my cervix. Where is my cervix?” Next, we see a naked woman rolling up and down a sand dune unceasingly.
Another moment sat with me throughout the movie, that of a little girl. A little girl learning to read, stumbling through the grotesque words of Dr. Cesare Lombroso, naively walking us through his diagnosis of a nine-year-old female, a “born thief”. Sachs explores the concept of criminal atavism by juxtaposing her daughter’s voice with the delusional criminalization of women based on their physical appearance. By pairing images of female child-like playfulness and purity with delusional artifacts of the late 19th century, she amplifies the gap between the male study of women and women themselves. She flows between the public, mainstream, male rationale and the private, subjective female counter-experience. We are left with the uncomfortable ambiguity of child-like giggles of lightness and historical screams of darkness.
At the core of Sachs’ exhibit lies her most intimate gaze upon womanhood. It is articulated into unspoken words on the screen:
“I am two bodies—the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk.” (We hear pencil scratches.)
The body of the body of a woman is biologically destined to be softer and therefore more fluid. All this fluidity, open space, holes, smells are often psychologically coupled with shame. Sachs’ words here represent the experience of most girls becoming women. This body of ours is too visceral for both us and the world to accept.
“The body of the body moves in cycles, and with every repetition there is a sensation of pain. The arrival of the body of the body forces the body of the mind to take notice, begrudgingly so. With legs crossed, the blood is caught just before it crosses the border into the public domain” (We hear a person peeing and a loud flushing of the toilet.)
Not only is the body of the body full of liquids and smells, but they threaten to spill over into the public domain. Our bodies and all their products are trained to be confined.
“Filled with infectious, infected liquids, we hold in the blood, the water, the sneeze, the wax, the hair, the pus, the breath. All that is ours to let go, to release onto this earth is held in, contained. I am the cauldron of dangerous substances.”
To defeat this imposed belief system of male ideas which we were fed throughout our lives is to inspect and observe your body for yourself. It takes a lot of courage to look into your own body with curiosity, rather than shame.
“I trace a path across my chest, searching for surprises I’d rather not find, knots in the fabric.”
Women are being re-educated to examine themselves instead of being examined by the cold metal-handed gynecologist. However, self-examination carries a burden of unforeseen surprises. Releasing our juices into the public, into the mainstream. Bravely facing the knots in the fabric as early signs of our bodies decaying.
“Undressed, we read our bodies like a history. Scars, muscles, curves of the spine. We look at ourselves from within. Collect our own data, create our own science. Begin to define.”
Built from the inside out, this new laboratory pushes against the walls of the old structure. An incendiary effect, but not arson.
When we are brave enough to look into the stretch marks, the scars, the wobbles, the curves, we own our space, our fluids and our bones. We collect and process our data, introduce new terminology. We allow for the soft to be malleable, buoyant, rather than flaccid and weak. We allow for differences. We allow for change. We allow for expression to re-place suppression. We become safely vulnerable instead of avoidant or anxious. We spit our words and meanings out instead of swallowing them.
In between the personal and the public domain lie Sachs’ women. These are real, physical women, subjects of anatomical studies, as well as women in paintings, subjects of the male painter’s gaze. The first, forced silent, the latter, painted static, confined to a space in history, “to be taken”. We witness a female artist looking at men looking at women.
Despite the immanently observational, passive and saddening tone of the movie, there is a promise in this exhibit. A promise that by carefully unfolding and studying the history of womanhood, one is already shaking the habitual. Sachs’ voice is not passive at all, it is rather filled with precisely focused meditative anger, an eloquent scream for justice, live from the gynecologist’s office, calling for help and cooperation.
To aid and support this novel conception of womanhood, we seek out new imagery, new viewpoints, new forms. Sachs’ filmography is a great start. The House of Science shifted my gaze to earlier works of art, predating celluloid. I searched for an alternative museum of womanhood. In particular, the Viennese modernist painters Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka stood out as engaging with the representation of women: as neither virgins nor whores, allowing their female subjects to escape this demeaning cage. They let their subjects move around freely, be comfortable, take up space, lie down wrapped up in themselves. Schiele went one step further: painting anger and anxiety on the faces of his subjects. “By exploring such subjects, the three artists simultaneously exhumed their own sexuality: their fears, sorrows, hopes, and ecstasies…their women do not necessarily submit passively to the male artistic gaze. They look back and demand to be understood on their own terms.”1 These were not the only attempts by men to redefine womanhood in a feminist way. However, the others were often buried and forgotten, most likely because they were single, isolated sprouts of change.
Although revolutionary, the idea that cooperation could displace competition has certainly taken root lately. This idea insinuates that equality is actually a lot more functional and productive for all parties involved. A very timely example would be the evolution of a virus (or a random constituted body of persons, empowered by the state, with a specific aim, e.g. to enforce the law). If a virus were to survive, it would have to evolve in a cooperative manner with its host. Eventually, many highly infectious and pathogenic viruses have decreased their pathogenicity in order to keep their hosts alive. Some have even been completely eradicated over time. This gives me hope, both for us as a species and us as women. However, to put this into practice, we need both the unspoken voices to be heard and the destructive, competitive voices to fade out. It would have to be a cooperative effort.
EINDNOTEN
Jane Kallir, ‘Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka – Men Looking at Women Looking at Men’, p. 59, in: Agnes Husslein-Arco Jane Kallir and Alfred Weidinger, The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, 2015
The Village Voice, vol XXXIV No. 49 December, 1989
Choices: Film by J. Hoberman
1989 Margaret Mead Film Festival
The first two days of this annual event include documentaries on Japanese war brides and Native American vets, Lapps and Papuans, Vienna remembering the Anschluss, and tourists in Yosemite. Among the highlights: Arthur Dong’s Forbidden City, a portrait of a venerable San Francisco tourist attraction with all Asian entertainment, and Lynne Sachs’ Sermons and Sacred Pictures, which recycles the 50-year-old amateur films of a Memphis Baptist minister.
December 4 through 7, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, 769-5305. (Hoberman)
An experimental documentary on Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister from Memphis, Tennessee who was also an inspired filmmaker with an overwhelming interest in preserving the social and cultural fabric of his own community in the 1930′ s and ‘ 40’ s . I combine his films and music recordings with my own images of Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings.
Taylor photographed and filmed businesses and schools in the black community, trips to the National Baptist Convention, baptisms, funerals, social events, and individuals in the quiet dignity of their everyday lives. Over the years he compiled an extraordinary record of black life in the South before the Civil Rights movement captured the attention of the nation. Sermons and Sacred Pictures combines Rev. Taylor’s black-and-white films and audio recordings with color images of contemporary Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings. Commentary by his widow and others who knew him forms an intertwined narrative focusing on Rev. Taylor as a pioneering documentarian and social activist. Taylor emerges as a man of humor, piety and intelligence, vibrantly involved in the community he loved.
Supported by a Pioneer Fund Grant for Emerging Documentary Filmmakers and a Film Arts Foundation Development Grant.
“Sermons and Sacred Pictures has a magical quality….It brings to life the work of Rev.. Taylor through his community filmmaking efforts. The film in turn affirms African-American identity and spirit.” Elaine Charnov, Margaret Mead Film Festival
“Viewers will be fascinated by this half hour documentary…among the highlights of the Margaret Mead Film Festival.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Screenings and Festivals include: Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989 and 2015) “Best Short Documentary” 1989 Athens (Ohio) Film Festival CINE Golden Eagle Margaret Mead Film Festival Robert Flaherty Film Seminar American Anthropological Association honoree, 1991 Black Cultural Expo (Memphis) honoree National Education Film Festival Award “Best Documentary” Sinking Creek Film Festival, Nashville WKNO Memphis, WYBE Philadelphia
In the library collections of: Duke, Los Angeles Public Library, Memphis State University, Newark Public Library, Northwestern, New York University, Reed College , Stanford and Temple
Lynne Sachs, Cinematograph Journal of Film and Media Art, 1988
“There is a shadow cast across Nina Fonoroff’s Department of the Interior. It is the shadow of the Founding Fathers, those luminous figures to whom we give credit for creating our laws, our language and our rational mode of thinking. Much to their possible chagrin, however, this office of the Executive Branch (which is given the responsibility of maintaining public land) is no longer completely intact. Instead, the irrationality of the Mother and the child has begun to take control.
Whether a relic of the state or the family, Fonoroff’s white wood panel suburban house leaves us with no more than a skeleton of a way of life.Through the apparatus of the camera lens, this sign of stability, propriety and happiness is read but never understood, visited but never entered. Time after time, I-as-a-spectator-am-brought-to-the-front-door-of-this-house. Yet I am excluded (as a woman?)from the very place I was told was mine to shape and to manage.I am left outside with my memories and my dreams.
•••
The hysteric, whose body is transformed into a theater for forgotten scenes, relives the past, bearing witness to a lost childhood that survives in suffering. (from The Newly Born Woman by Helen Cixous and Catherine Clement)
The various codes contained within the film tell us how to read practically every element involved in its construction as a text. The exchange between the music (Gian Carlo Minotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors) and the domestic banging around, for example, establishes a tension between those sounds created by culture and those that are natural expressions of human unrest. Eventually, the opera is destroyed – cut to pieces by ringing bells, furniture thrown to the floor, knocking.
There is a compelling, almost consuming quality to the overall tone of Department of the Interior. Perhaps it is the enigma of these particulars. Fonoroff deposits a curious array of clues into the floating, evolving box we call a film. Then we (as spectators or researchers) are left with the intriguing task of compiling these facts and creating a narrative, our own “theater of forgotten scenes’.’
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker living in San Francisco. She is currently working on an experimental documentary based on the life of a minister from Memphis, Tennessee who made his own films in the 1930s and ’40s.”
